Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Mike Q HI-TEC Educator Of The Year

Today I had the honor of presenting Mike Qaissaunee the HI-TEC Educator of the Year Award. HI-TEC is a national conference on advanced technical education where technical educators, counselors, industry professionals, and technicians can update their knowledge and skills. HI-TEC uniquely explores the convergence of scientific disciplines and technologies.

Here's the text from the presentation:

The HI-TEC Educator of the Year Award recognizes a community college educator for outstanding contributions to advanced technological education. Nominees for the award must have had a demonstrated impact on technology education on both a local and national level.

This year there were several excellent nominees and the decision was a difficult one. As you probably know, Michael Qaissaunee is this year’s awardee.

Many of you know Mike, an Associate Professor of Engineering and Technology at Brookdale Community College and founding director of the Mid-Atlantic Institute for Telecommunications Technologies . As Principal Investigator of this NSF project, Mike led the development and implementation of numerous courses related to wireless communications technologies. He’s also Co-Principal Investigator for the National Information and Communications Technologies Center in Massachusetts, serving as a subject matter expert in wireless communications and leading ICT Center's national dissemination efforts.

He’s been involved with many projects around the United States and in 2007 was selected as recipient of the Global Wireless Education Consortium (GWEC) Wireless Educator of the Year Award.

He is a national leader and expert (many refer to him as a Rock Star) promoting the adoption of new technologies and approaches to teaching and learning, including: blogs, audio and video podcasts, wikis, mobile computing and educational gaming and simulation. This includes workshops and keynote addresses in wireless, wireless security, iPhone programming, and Web 2.0.

Here’s some things you may not know about Mike:

His father Abdul was the first person from his village in Afghanistan to go beyond elementary school. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) brought him to the U.S. in the midst of his 11th-grade year. He graduated with honors from the University of Wyoming and returned to Kabul, where he headed the technology department at the technical high school he had left only two and half years earlier.

Three years later, USAID brought him back to America to study highway engineering. Barbara (Mike’s Mom who is here today) and Abdul met at the University of Illinois where she was completing her master's degree in library science. After Abdul completed his PhD, he and Barbara moved back to Afghanistan where he began working at Kabul University, eventually becoming Dean of the Engineering school.

In Afghanistan, his parents had three children--Mike is the middle child. In 1973 Barbara and Abdul moved their family from Afghanistan to Delaware where Abdul took a faculty position and Barbara worked as a librarian at Delaware State.

Both of Mike’s parents were a great inspiration and instilled great value on teaching and learning. Mike graduated from high school in Delaware at the top of his class and was accepted at a number of top engineering schools including MIT. He selected the University of Delaware for his Mechanical Engineering degrees.

Mike now lives in New Jersey with two other great inspirations - his wife Laura and daughter Haley.

I’ve had the honor of working and getting to know Mike for the past 6-7 years. He’s intelligent, honest, respectful, humble and has a great sense of humor. We’re pretty lucky to be working with him and his students are pretty lucky to be in his classes.

I can’t think of a more deserving person for this first HI-TEC Educator of the Year Award.

Please join me in congratulating Mike!

Some of the pictures from the conference are linked here.

Way to go Mike Q!!!!!!!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Gordon,

Thank you so much for you generous words and all the support over the years. I'm embarrassed to be singled out like this with so many great educators surrounding us. I have to credit my accomplishments to you and all the other great faculty I've learned so much from the last 7 years.

Cheers!

Mike Q

Rådgivende ingeniør said...

Great blog, this article really nice. For you Mr. Gordon keep up the good work. And for you Mike, your really humble your illegible to achieve that kind of award.